An important area for the maintenance of a fleet of transportation vehicles involves tire and wheel bearings within vehicles. This is particularly true of trailers, since such trailers are generally equipped with less sophisticated sensors from an electronics point of view.
In today's systems, inspection and maintenance of tires and wheel bearings is done manually at regular intervals. The intervals could be based on a combination of mileage and time. However, manual inspection of tires and wheel bearings may depend on the skill of the operator and may be error prone. Furthermore, the inspection typically occurs when the trailer or vehicle is stationary and therefore is merely a snapshot of the condition of the tire and wheel bearings. This may cause errors, especially when components are not easily visible and there is generally no indication of impending failure.
Rotating components such as tires and wheel bearings (bearings) perform under significant stress, and are generally overdesigned so that catastrophic failure is mitigated. However, even with such considerations, economic pressures tend to cause some lower integrity components to be installed. For example, a tire carcass that comprises a loadbearing component such as the bead and chords is often “recapped” or “retreaded” after a thorough cleaning and inspection of the carcass condition. However, unlike a new tire, a cap component has a lower integrity and it is not uncommon for separation or delamination to occur, resulting in overheating and destructive shedding of some or all of the tire.
While tire pressure monitoring systems (TPMS) allow an operator to monitor tire pressures in a vehicle, such TPMS systems only provide alarms after a tire suddenly loses pressure or blows. This does not deal with bearing degradation or tire delamination issues.